New playing card projects are popping up on Kickstarter regularly. RJ Tomlinson (Titanic Playing Cards,Gettysburg Civil Unrest Playing Cards, etc.) presents Pompeii Playing Cards. His custom poker playing cards are inspired by the novel, The Last Days of Pompeii, written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1834. Mr. Bulwer-Lytton was an English novelist, poet, playwright, and politician. He devoted his novel to the tragedy of the city of Pompeii, the ancient Roman town-city near modern Naples, Italy. It was destroyed and buried under ash and pumice in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

“Brawl in the Family” Playing Cards (Bitf Cards) were created by the American comic artist and writer, Matthew Taranto. The deck is some type of by-product of his parody comic strip dedicated to adventures of many famous Nintendo characters that have appeared in the Smash Bros games.

“Brawl in the Family is a comic strip centering on Kirby and by extension, many famous Nintendo characters that have appeared in the Smash Bros games. There are cameos from other titles as well. The strip began as a series of doodles during one of my many art history classes in college. I was bored one night and doodled up six comics, then put them online on a message board on IGN. From there, people seemed to enjoy them, so I put them up at a few other locations, such as Game FAQs. It began as a comic about the Kirby characters, but once I added the Smash Bros cast (and Kirby’s interaction with them), the scope of the strip expanded significantly.

Most of the characters in Brawl in the Family are parodies of characters that are the property of their respective copyright owners (mostly Nintendo Co. Ltd. and Masahiro Sakurai). This is a parody strip. I did not create the original characters, merely these bizarre interpretations of them.” ~ Matthew Taranto

The deck: 52 playing cards + 2 different Jokers. Poker size. All faces of the playing cards are custom. Playing cards were printed on cardboard and have some kind of “embossed finish”. Tuck cases are glossy (slightly).

This is a quick drawing from a Polish artist, Judyta Anna Murawska (Fukari). She says that the artwork was “inspired” by boring classes 🙂 This playing card artwork is the one way Ace of Clubs. Taking into account that some “queen of stars” is featured in the card, indices of the Queen of Clubs could be more natural for it. But this is author’s vision. She sees the Ace of Clubs as a dreaming lady – a big admirer of piercing.

Kerri-Jane Mitchell, an artist from Cape Town (South Africa), designed the Queen of Hearts as some symbiosis of two epochs in the life of this lady. Different ages, different moods – different dresses, different friends 🙂

Molly Maloney, an Ameriacan artist, has some stories in her mind which provoke her to design playing cards. Someday she plans to complete a full deck of playing cards devoted to the several stories. Each suit will tell a separate story. Court cards will be devoted to main characters of appropriate stories. Each number card should be a part of the respective story. Molly named only the story for Diamonds, the story of Kaguya Hime. I guess the full set will force the artist to name all stories.

Kaguya Hime (Princess Kaguya), also known as Taketori Monogatari (The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter), is a 10th-century Japanese folktale. It tells the story about the life of a mysterious girl called Kaguya-hime, who was discovered as a baby inside the stalk of a glowing bamboo plant.

Two artists from Mexico, Karen & Sara (TheUrbanTeam), designed this Joker. Their inspiration from anime seems obvious. Young ladies made him quite cocky. It’s interesting what he has in his right hand. Anyway, if you even have two aces, don’t hold cards in such way playing any game with people – they can lose their interest to cards and knead their muscles.